


Hunters

by LunaCatriona



Series: Black Water (Alternative POVs) [1]
Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: black water, chapter 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25517596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaCatriona/pseuds/LunaCatriona
Summary: "'Til the bottom drops out and you learn we're all just hunters seeking solid ground." ('Orpheus', Sara Bareilles)The latter scene of Chapter 2 of Black Water, but from Nicola's point of view.Sometimes, the only thing you can do is call the one person you trust more than you like.[TW: mention of rape]
Series: Black Water (Alternative POVs) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848652
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	Hunters

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on these for a while, but never had the time to actually finish and post any of them. This is the first. They probably won't be in order, because I'm way too disorganised for that. Also finding the time to restart working on We Will Stand, too, little by little.

Nicola Murray stopped.

The rain battered her, darkness found in oceans between streetlights, where she might be swallowed up if she went too close. Was that what the world had to be for her now? Seas of darkness lit only by tiny lights too high for her to reach?

Where was she? She could remember stumbling out of the house. She could feel the bruises where James had left his boot prints. She remembered him saying Katie would be alive if Nicola had not been a shit enough parent to lift her grounding for the day. She remembered pressing her lips together, terrified that she might scream and wake the children. She even remembered choosing the run, because it was Nicola he wanted to kill. He had lost one child – he would not harm any of the others. Not tonight, anyway.

But she did not recall walking.

What time was it?

She felt for her phone; she couldn’t remember stuffing the thing in the pocket of her pyjama bottoms, but it was there. Its screen informed her that it was seven minutes past three in the morning. Why was she still out? Normally, she would have gone home. Gone home and faced the music.

Not tonight. He might actually kill her.

It was a funny thing, to be afraid for one’s life. Part of her reckoned she might have been melodramatic over the entire thing. And then she saw in her memory the livid venom in his eyes when he had lain his first punch into her gut. She was sure he had wanted to kill her.

Her hands shook as she looked for a number in her phone that she could call.

Though she wanted to more than anything, she could not call her mother. The woman knew her too well, and besides, she was a doctor. She would know a beating to see it when she insisted on checking Nicola over. Though she knew she would have to tell her mum what had happened – or the very basics of it – in order to keep the kids safe in the long term, she could not deal with it tonight. And if James did try to find her, the first person he would ask was her mother. Nicola didn’t want to bring that to her door at three in the morning.

As she scrolled through her phone, it became quickly clear that she had no friends. None she trusted with this. None she had even told about Katie yet. There was Caroline, Molly’s mother, but she was at the hospital, watching over Molly in intensive care.

But everyone else? They knew nothing.

Malcolm. Malcom bloody Tucker. If nothing else, he would stand between her and James. He might not particularly like her – sometimes, she thought he really did hate her – but he would never let James lay a hand upon her in his presence. She could tell him it was just an argument and, unless James showed up at his door, he would probably believe her.

He had been almost kind to her today. It had been rather unnerving. He had even let the nurses think he was her husband so that she would not have to go through it alone. It meant he was not completely void of compassion, however massive a cunt he was capable of being.

Panic rose through her like shards of glass sticking into her chest. Malcolm Tucker. Her life had come to a point where Malcolm fucking Tucker was the person she wanted.

What if he turned out to be just like James, though? What if he came out here and lost his temper with her? Or made her pay for her stupidity when they got to work in the morning? She was barely tolerable; she knew that well, and not least because she struggled to tolerate herself half the time.

Tears poured down her face, leaving her unsure where they ended and the rain began. Why was she getting into this state?

Katie.

No, it wasn’t Katie. She banished that thought into the darkness that lurked between the lights above. Katie’s fate did not cause this.

But Katie was gone.

She couldn’t be gone, could she? Katie was here. Somewhere. Somewhere out there, Katie was okay. She had to be. Nicola didn’t think she could survive if she wasn’t.

Rain lashed harder into Nicola’s face, and so she broke through that conversation to call Malcolm. It was a little like admitting defeat, pressing that green button.

“Hello?” answered Malcolm. He sounded asleep. Would he be angry with her for waking him?

“Malcolm, I’m lost,” she blurted out. She tried to swallow back her sob, but it tore through her chest regardless and left a raw, gaping hole in its wake.

“What?” he asked. It seemed he was confused more than angry, but that might not last.

She threw her waterlogged hair from her face. “I had a bust up with James and I walked out the house in my pyjamas, and I just kept walking until he stopped calling me.” It was a lie. James had not bother to call her at all. However, it sounded better to have ignored her worried husband than to admit she had fled from the scene of a beating and could not recall having gone in any direction. “I must have walked for fucking miles. I don’t even recognise-”

But he cut over her, his tone urgent. “Is there anything there that can give you a clue where you are? Any pubs, restaurants, schools, public buildings?”

Nicola turned around and tried to take in her surroundings through the rain. She spotted one sign that got her attention. “Corpus Christi,” she read out to him.

“The Catholic school?” Malcolm asked after a moment.

“Yeah, I think so.” It did look like a school from here, anyway.

“How the fuck did you get to Lambeth?!” bellowed Malcolm. There it was – the rage she had known must surely come. “Did you walk? You must be fucking freezing!”

“Not really,” she said, though she was now tracking the route the cold raindrops made down her face and neck.

“Fuck _sake_!” His muted snarl startled her; he was far more prone to shouting his anger. She heard the car engine start and he told her, “Stay where you are. Do not fucking move, Nic’la, I mean it! I’m on my way.”

Unable to answer him with anything coherent, she said, “Okay,” and hung the phone up.

Nicola noticed only now how heavy her clothes were when saturated with water. They clung to her skin, never warming as her body got colder. She should have called Malcolm hours ago. As soon as it happened. Why hadn’t she?

She couldn’t account for at least the last three hours. It was a blank. She vaguely remembered hearing church bells and realising she had hit midnight, but as for where she had walked, it was a huge black hole in her memory. It wasn’t helpful, not to know where she had been. What if she had done something stupid or horrible while she had been blanking her life out?

Really, she was just lucky James had not followed her. He probably only hadn’t followed her because what he wanted to do to her could not be done in public; he could not cause a scene in front of other people if he wanted to continue to go unpunished for his behaviour. God, if other people knew the things he had done. But he was perfectly plausible to other people, and so Nicola would never be believed if she were to come clean about it all. He didn’t come across as a man who would rape his wife, after all.

So often over the course of the past weeks she had tried to convince herself he had not done that to her. She tried to tell herself that he was just a bit rough, that he didn’t mean to hurt her, that it hadn’t been his intention to force her…but she had told him to stop. She had told him he was hurting her. And still he had done it.

Thinking about it made her shake. She could hear him, feel his touch, smell the alcohol in the rain. The rain was the only thing grounding her to this Earth, keeping her from descending completely into memory.

Nicola kept herself present in the world, it was true, but the remnants of the fear she had felt coursed through her veins, poison in her bloodstream. She trembled. There was nothing she could do to stop herself from shaking.

A car’s engine broke through the pounding of the rain; a tall figure leapt out to her and wrapped a heavy coat around her. “You fucking idiot,” he said, his voice rumbling like thunder in the skies. Nicola looked up at him. He was not angry. Whatever that was blazing in his eyes, it was neither anger nor hatred.

It reminded her more of the way she knew she looked at her kids when their recklessness got them hurt.

He didn’t hate her. He _cared_. He knew she was a madwoman and it didn’t bother him.

Malcolm Tucker cared, and it was too much for Nicola Murray to bear. She collapsed into a broken torrent of tears and sobs; she could hear his low sigh. “C’mere,” he said to her.

It wasn’t even a decision she made, to trust him. This man was not James. He would not bring her to harm.

She leaned into his chest and drank in the warmth that suddenly surrounded her. His hand was on the back of her head; he held her close, but he did it so carefully that the bruises she wore did not screech at her. They merely ached. That ache was nothing compared to the solace of being held by another person. One that, for all his flaws and eccentricities, would never do to her what her own husband had done.

Malcolm Tucker, it turned out, was a good man. She had to love him just a little for it.


End file.
